A federal judge on Thursday ordered the Internal Revenue Service to explain how it lost two years’ worth of a former official’s emails, and tapped a magistrate judge to find out whether the documents can be obtained from other sources.

At a hearing in a conservative group’s lawsuit, U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan gave the IRS until Aug. 10 to provide a sworn declaration explaining how the email loss occurred. The IRS previously has said that the emails were lost because the top agency official’s computer crashed in 2011, and backup tapes were routinely reused after six months.

Less than two weeks after the IRS inspector general had circulated a draft report on the agency's unlawful targeting of conservative groups, Ms. Lerner reached out to IT specialist Maria Hooke to inquire about IRS record-keeping of internal communications. Ms. Lerner wrote:

"I had a question today about OCS [Microsoft Office Communications Server]. I was cautioning folks about email and how we have several occasions where Congress has asked for emails and there has been an electronic search for responsive emails – so we need to be cautious about what we say in emails. Someone asked if OCS conversations were also searchable – I don't know, but told them I would get back to them. Do you know?"

Ms. Hooke responded that individual employees could choose to save their communications, but that the software was not set to automatically save any messages.

Comments

Does anyone else recall the scenes from "Presumed Innocent" in which Rusty Sabich (Harrison Ford) is accused of killing his lover by prosecutor Tommy Molto and sarcastically answers "Yeah, right"? Molto later tries to take the stand to testify to Sabich's "admission" and the judge notes some inherent ambiguity in the response?